Mary McCarthy Quotes

Truth exists independent of style. It involves all kinds of issues. Properly considered, it's a quest, a pursuit. To say that vérité is more truthful than something that is narrated is just misplaced. Completely wrong. And the fact that people still talk about it as though they're really talking about something... it puzzles me greatly. A moment of reflection about it tells you that it makes no sense!

One can lie, but truth is more interesting.

One side sticks to the facts, and the other side is close to playing with its poop.

The stronger the facts are there, you should achieve justice. You don't need to make sensationalized statements.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

I know for a fact that I am not as fulfilled, happy or passionate about life if I have not spent time helping others.

The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is.

Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

I teach at Georgetown, and I see that the students have so many different interests. The main thing is to match your passion with your knowledge, because you can't just be passionate without knowing the facts, and facts are really boring without passion.

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play.

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

No amount of facts in his head can compensate for the lack of fire on his lips.

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.

The fact that there is a robust debate in Congress is good. The fact that the debate sometimes seems unanchored to facts is not so good.

For me, love is very non-academic. Love, it’s a very physical thing. I don’t mean physical in terms of - I mean, it can be sexual. But those moments when I’m aware of the fact that I love someone or love something, it really manifests physically.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.